Facilities and Resources

Shop, Studio Spaces and Libraries

FACILITIES AND RESOURCES

The Department of Architecture and Urban Design occupies its own building, Perloff Hall, at the north end of the UCLA campus. Most courses are held in the building, which contains studio spaces, electronic studios, computers, lecture halls, an exhibition gallery, classrooms, and faculty offices. Architecture students have their own drawing tables and storage areas. M.A. and Ph.D. students have their own designated study area in the building.

TECHNOLOGY FACILITIES

Fabrication Shop
Emerging technologies for visualization and fabrication are vital to contemporary architectural practice. UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design continues to set the scholastic standard fro the integration of cutting-edge technologies into the overall academic curriculum. Our Technology Center grows in equipment and expertise each year and currently provides two large-format mills, three laser-cutters, two 3-D printers, and two large-scale vacuum formers for student use. Complementing the equipment is an expanding database of expertise on emerging technology and its application that allows new users immediate access to established techniques and methods of production. AUD students have early and continual access to this equipment and knowledge base and are vital to the continual growth of this aspect of our program.

Technology is integrated into the curriculum in a variety of ways. Technology seminars and studios focus directly on applying emerging technologies to contemporary design problems using the equipment intensively throughout the quarter. Ideas and methods devised in these courses then move through the rest of the AUD atmosphere. Courses focused on history and theory also address the role and impact of these developments on practice. Ingrained within the larger culture of the department and easily accessible to students at all levels in the curriculum, emerging technology plays a central role in the work produced at UCLA.

Computing Facilities
The Architecture and Urban Design Computing Facilities are devoted to advanced design, education, and research. Encompassing electronic studios, a media ready multi-purpose room (Decafè), and access to additional school-wide resources at the School of the Arts and Architecture, the Department provides a rich environment supporting professional use as well as specialized software development and design innovations. Perloff Hall is a wireless environment. In addition to wired network access in the studios, wireless network access is available throughout Perloff Hall.

The Architecture and Urban Design Department Infrastructure supports a networked,distributed computing environment that includes the ability for students to connect their personal systems. File and print services are available to users throughout Perloff Hall. File and print services are provided primarily by several Linux servers. These are augmented by shared disks on the network to provide over two terabytes of disk storage. Output devices range from letter size black and white and color laser printers to 36 inch wide color plotters. Flatbed and 35mm slide scanners as well as digital video capture are available for input. Workstations are equipped with CD/DVD burners for file transfer and backup. The entire Architecture and Urban Design network is connected to the UCLA campus network, which provides the Department with high-speed access to the Internet.

The facility supports software for a wide range of computer–aided design, modeling, graphics, virtual reality, and real–time simulation. (All brand/product names or trademarks are the property of their respective holders.)

Bruin Online is a service provided in addition to the services provided by the Department of Architecture and Urban Design. UCLA provides the Bruin Online service to all faculty, staff, and students providing centralized e-mail services and remote access to UCLA departmental networks and to the Internet. It also provides digital access to many UCLA campus and library facilities (for example: the campus bookstore and the ORION and MELVYL databases).

MULTIPURPOSE FACILITIES

Visual Resource Room
The Visual Resource Room features current issues of 20 national and international design magazines covering architecture, graphic design, product design, and interiors. This multipurpose room is used for individual study as well as for meetings and discussion sections.

Decafé
The Decafé is the Department’s intellectual and symbolic center. Primarily corporeal rather than conceptual, the renovated Decafé stimulates the visual, auditory and touch senses to create a synesthetic experience. An expansive and rhythmic felt landscape surrounds the audience while local surface features produce a tactile awareness of the suppleness of new interior. The project was designed and installed as part of a seminar in 2006 entitled Synesthesia taught by Heather Roberge and Jason Payne.

RESOURCES AT UCLA

UCLA Arts Library
The Arts Library, 1400 Public Policy Building, is an interdisciplinary research collection in the areas of architecture and history of architecture as well as art, art history, design, film and television, photography as a fine art, studio art, and theater comprised of more than 254,000 volumes. Holdings in architecture include approximately 51,000 books wholly or partially devoted to the field, 650 current serial subscriptions (including some 300 periodicals), extensive backfiles of periodicals with indexes, and a collection of Department of Architecture theses. The library receives the most important American, European, Japanese, and Australian architecture titles, and also gets many leading periodicals covering graphic, industrial, and furniture design. Its holdings, particularly in the areas of regional and contemporary architecture, are continuously expanding.

Students and faculty also regularly use other nearby campus libraries. The Young Research Library Department of Special Collections actively collects drawings and papers of architects and landscape architects. Among the architects represented are Richard Neutra, A. Quincy Jones, S. Charles Lee, and Lloyd Wright.

UCLA offers an abundant choice of digital resources for architecture students. ORION2, the University Library’s online information system, provides access to books, archives, audiovisuals, computer files, dissertations, government documents, and maps in all UCLA libraries. The California Digital Library’s (CDL) Melvyl Catalog provides computerized access to similar multimedia resources in the libraries of the nine UC campuses, the California State Library, the California Academy of Sciences, the California Historical Society, and the Center for Research Libraries.